The Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election | Hacker News Reader

The Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election

time.com

30 pointsmudil7 comments

Interesting how much people's perception can be influenced by simple framing. The revelations in this article are actually quite similar to some of the "conspiracy theory" type of allegations made by those questioning the legitimacy of the most recent election.

>That’s why the participants want the secret history of the 2020 election told, even though it sounds like a paranoid fever dream–a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information

Not to choose a side, but considering Trump only lost the popular vote by a few percent, one could argue that this constitutes mass disenfranchisement, especially in light of the fact that republicans are underrepresented in the institutions that the article is alleging colluded.

The real danger here in my opinion is that it's incredibly difficult for laypeople to form unbiased opinions, as the media that we all consume has very clearly chosen a side, perhaps moreso than in the past, under the guise of "saving democracy". So in a way this article also legitimizes trump's infamous claim of "fake news".

Edit: won -> lost

“It’s a conspiracy theory until we tell you otherwise!”

Trump never won the popular vote. Clinton won the popular vote in 2016 and Biden won it in 2020.

Interesting. Did you see any evidence of actual vote suppression? Or is it the fact that this bipartisan effort was necessary to stop a "Republican" with autocratic tendencies from dismantling confidence in our democracy that somehow "disenfranchises" Republican voters?

>Did you see any evidence of actual vote suppression

Well, first, the allegations being silenced are more than just vote suppression. Second, how can anyone expect to find evidence when news, entertainment, and tech companies who control the flow information in public media, private media, and de facto public squares, have colluded toward a particular outcome?

More importantly, how can you be so sure that 45 had "autocratic tendencies" when presumably your sources of information are controlled and manipulated by the same participants in this conspiracy? Bias may be unavoidable, but in "fortifying" the elections, what these people have really done is perpetrated a mass well poisoning, though IMO this started before even the first election.

I would further argue that manipulating the flow of information to suppress one side on a mass scale, particularly when these are not fringe ideas, does amount to a form of voter suppression. We should all be concerned by the notion that a handful of oligarchs flexed their technocratic muscle to effectively manipulate tens of millions of people. Bear in mind also that these oligarchs had non-political motivation to collude, given the adversarial relationship between trump and media, and the rumors of a possible crackdown on/breakup of Tech's dominance over modern discourse. This was an unprecedented flexing of soft power concentrated in the hands of a tiny fraction of the population, ostensibly in anticipation of undemocratic behavior. And as a bonus, it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy when this "cabal" can then unilaterally label any questioning of the results as damaging to democracy because by controlling the content and flow of information.

There's a far larger issue here than the results of a single election.

I don't know what you're complaining about. They double-checked, and they're really sure we elected the right person!

Your response would be comical if you weren't a voter.

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